How Democrats Changed Everything
· The Intercept
The size of the Democrats’ victory Tuesday night shattered records and even the most optimistic expectations, handing the party a governing mandate with a clear demand for change.
Visit newsbetting.club for more information.
But what do voters want that change to look like? This week on The Intercept Briefing, politics reporter Jessica Washington and managing editor Maia Hibbett break down Tuesday night’s election and hear from voters in Maine, Michigan, and Texas about what drove them to the polls in the midterms that saw a so-called “blue tsunami.”
“The rich get richer, the poor get poorer,” said one voter in Maine. In Michigan, a voter told The Intercept that politics “feels like a game that the rich play sometimes.” A Texas voter expressed anger that President Donald Trump was “spending taxpayer money to renovate the White House and turn it into this gold sanctuary.”
Frustration with wealth inequality and money in politics came up again and again in The Intercept’s conversations with voters. So did a desire for more social welfare spending, Medicare for All, freedom for Palestinians — and responses to transphobic and Islamophobic fearmongering on the campaign trail.
“When Democrats win so far across the board, you can make an argument that any faction of the Democratic Party has the mandate,” said Hibbett, “because Democrats of all stripes won Tuesday night.”
In any case, the results indicated a clear disapproval of the way the Trump administration is governing and the use of fearmongering as a tactic of distraction.
“One lesson maybe for Democrats is there’s no point in attempting to placate people when it comes to bigotry,” said Washington. “The thing that’ll motivate voters is if you can convince them that you’re going to make their lives better, not if you can convince them that you’re playing the middle on an issue of civil rights.”
For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Transcript
Bruce Bryan: We’re just hoping that people step up and tell Washington to go fuck itself.
Jessica Washington: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.
Maia Hibbett: And I’m Maia Hibbett, managing editor here.
JW: Over the past few days, Intercept reporters hit the ground in key states to speak to voters about the issues driving them to the polls. We went to Texas.
Jermiah Robinson: The food prices, for one, and the gas prices.
Darryl Moore: Gotta work two jobs just to make it.
Tiffany Williams: I never really understood, like, how important it is for the minority to vote.
Lenna Tasby: This election is important because this election is going to make or break whether we have a vote or not. There’s a reason why they’re shutting down these polling places.
Intercept reporter Akela Lacy: What are the issues that motivated you this cycle?
Charles Senter: Well, I love Trump.
Helen Dexter: Red ticket all the way. The stop of the Muslim influx.
Lenna Tasby: If you’re spending taxpayer money to renovate the White House and turn it into this gold sanctuary, that’s money that can be used for our military veterans. That’s money that can be used to help with this homeless population. The government needs to be held accountable.
MH: We heard from voters in Michigan.
Erin Horne: The election this year is very critical because Trump’s got two more years.
Zouheir Alawieh: Our democracy is in danger.
Noora Iskander: I believe in Medicare for All. People have a right to self-determination, especially in Palestine.
Wendy: There’s a lot of concern about, of course, the economy, but the data centers, our children’s education.
JW: And we spoke to voters in Maine.
Intercept reporter Noah Hurowitz: What mattered to you as a voter this election?
Tyler Echard: Cost for the most part. Everything keeps going up.
Bryan Golay: The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. At least 30 years ago, there was like a veneer of caring, and now there’s just blatant corruption and greed.
JW: So Maia, what a night.
MH: Yeah, it’s honestly embarrassing if you’re a Democrat and you did not win. They swept the House and the Senate by just about the biggest margins that the pollsters could have predicted. So luckily, the audience I’m concerned about, the pollsters, can rest easy. As of 11:00 a.m. [ET] on Wednesday morning, they had 228 seats in the House, Democrats did. They only needed 218 for a majority, so obviously that is more, and they’re expected to pick up some more seats as some more races get called. They had 54 seats in the Senate, which means that they have a big enough margin that they can’t be stopped from legislating by one lone senator, if one senator wanted to gum things up.
JW: And not at all surprising. The White House tried to spin Republican losses on Trump not being on the ballot and the quality of candidates, despite the fact that Trump repeatedly said at rallies across the country, “Pretend I’m on the ballot.”
Donald Trump: We’re going to ask you to pretend I’m on the ballot, because when I’m on the ballot, this has nothing to do with ego, I just get 49.2 percent more vote. And if we get even a good percentage of that, we’ll have the biggest victory that you’ve ever seen.
MH: He’s saying, “We’ll have the biggest victory ever” — and it was a very historic night. I think people will hear the word “historic” a lot in the coverage in the coming days because of this huge blue wave, not the kind of history Trump wanted, but also because there are some really surprising major firsts.
One of them was that last night, very early, like at 2:30 a.m. [ET], Abdul El-Sayed became the winner of the Senate race in Michigan, which means he will be the first ever Muslim U.S. senator.
Related
Abdul El-Sayed Wins Senate Seat With Pro-Palestine Campaign
Abdul El-Sayed (acceptance speech): To all the kids who watched this last month, to all the parents who struggled to explain why the president openly mocked someone for their name or how they pray, let them know tomorrow that the bad guys lost.
JW: That race was filled with Islamophobia, both in the primary and in the general election. His Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, just peddled in a million different Islamophobic tropes. Voters told our colleague, Matt Sledge, who was out in Michigan speaking with them, that they really didn’t like hearing all of this hate speech.
Zouheir Alawieh: They don’t have any programs for our economy, for our health, for our future. So that’s why they are attacking us as Muslims and as human beings.
Tea Edwards: Just, like, all of the Islamophobic hate campaigns that have been going around will probably sway a few people. The people who are actually researching what will be good for communities I think will see right through it.
MH: This was a campaign that was defined by so much panic about El-Sayed being Muslim. The race ended 25 years after 9/11, and there were all of these really kind of vitriolic Islamophobic tropes. It reminded me a lot of the campaign against [Mayor] Zohran Mamdani here in New York last year. There’s all this fear of the left and this fearmongering suggesting that there’s no way a Muslim candidate could represent American interests.
And of course, one of the big differences between El-Sayed and Mamdani is that El-Sayed is not a socialist.
JW: Say that again for the people in the back, because they are not going to believe you. El-Sayed has described himself as a capitalist who understands how capitalism works, so definitely not a socialist.
I’ve heard him described as much more of a [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren than someone in the Bernie Sanders mold.
MH: But he still faced millions of dollars in outside spending in this race, mostly because of his stance on the United States relationship to one other country.
We’ve heard in some of these deep-blue districts in the House races where socialists were elevated in the primaries, there was a lot of rhetoric on opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza and fighting U.S. weapons flows to Israel. But it’s pretty rare to hear that from a U.S. Senate candidate, and now from a senator-elect.
JW: It also caused some really ugly drama with his former primary opponent, Haley Stevens.
MH: Do you want to try to recap that as fast as we can, or should I?
JW: I’ll get started and see if you can add in anything that I miss.
Related
Radical Centrists Like Haley Stevens Are the Real Extremists in the Democratic Party
So essentially, on the Friday right before [Election Day], Haley Stevens released a statement condemning an ad that was not even created by the El-Sayed campaign, calling on him to condemn the ad, which he did disavow. She also asked him to take back his statements on Israel.
Now, things seemed fine for a second. Haley Stevens had all of these Democratic surrogates going on air saying that she promised to support him. While Haley Stevens’s staffers were at an event for El-Sayed, Haley Stevens popped up at an event supporting the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers, giving him her endorsement.
Maia, is there anything that I missed in that?
MH: Jessie, I think the only thing you missed was just how baffling and strange this episode was. So you mentioned this ad that kicked it off. It was produced by this outside group Rebellion PAC, which is the group headed by Cenk Uygur, who some listeners might know from The Young Turks. He is also famously Hasan Piker’s uncle.
Haley Stevens, as she was struggling to explain why she switched from El-Sayed to the Rogers camp, kept citing Hasan Piker and the “uncle.” It was this kind of almost incomprehensible move where Anderson Cooper, the CNN host, was pressing her at one point, saying, well, you cite his affiliation with Hasan Piker and this part of the Democratic Party you don’t like, but you knew about this before — so what changed?
It really seemed strange. So we sent Matt Sledge out in Michigan to ask some voters what they thought of it, and if they thought that this was a politically savvy move that would have any resonance. And here’s what they said.
Kathleen Britton: I’m so disappointed in Haley Stevens. I gave her serious consideration during the primary.
Related
Haley Stevens Destroyed Her Political Career for Absolutely Nothing
Jesse Craft: She fought against Mike Rogers, then said somehow he earned her vote. I don’t really understand it. I kinda think it’s career-ending for her.
Wendy: How embarrassing to use an African American church. How embarrassing for you to use our votes and then disregard them because of your own personal issues.
Intercept reporter Matt Sledge: So you don’t think it’s gonna help Mike Rogers?
Kathleen Britton: I do not.
Erin Horne: No, I think she actually helped Abdul.
[Break]
JW: Maia, before the break, you started talking about money and politics, and I want to get into how that shaped the midterms. Last week, we talked about how this election cycle became the most expensive on record. Midterms ad spending is expected to reach north of $11.6 billion. Mega-donors overwhelmingly gave to Republican candidates, including Elon Musk, who spent nearly $450 million, with large sums of that directed at boosting Ken Paxton in Texas, who, by the way, lost to James Talarico. Now, for context, the next highest donors under Musk are a Republican couple [Richard and
Elizabeth Uihlein] who spent $150 million, mostly in Wisconsin and Illinois.
Jesse Craft: We all see where money is coming from. It’s coming from very, very wealthy billionaires. I don’t think we should be able to buy elections.
Tea Edwards: Politics, it just feels like a game that the rich play sometimes. Kind of feels hopeless when you’re just looking at all of these people and corporations giving money to each other.
MH: You hate to see Elon Musk throw away almost half a billion dollars. It only leaves him so many billions to go.
JW: Heartbreaking.
MH: But, I mean, in Texas, as you mentioned, that money really did not pan out. It didn’t seem to sway voters. It seemed like if anything from the voters who talked to our reporters in Texas, in Michigan, and in Maine, which we’ll get to later, people were really mad about outside election spending and don’t like the idea that billionaires or corporations can buy their elections.
Related
Anti-Trans Panic Couldn’t Save Republicans in Deep-Red Texas
And in Texas, a lot of that money went to propping up this anti-trans panic campaign that Paxton was running. But all that money was not enough to save Paxton from James Talarico. Paxton was a pretty bad candidate: He was mired in too many scandals to keep track of, including a 2015 grand jury indictment on felony securities fraud charges.
In 2020, eight of his top deputies reported to the FBI that he was potentially abusing his office to do favors for a donor and friend. And just earlier this year, he offered a plea deal in a child sex abuse case that seemed to anger Texans and voters.
Remember, this is the era of the Epstein files and people being very concerned about child sex abuse. It did not seem like the wisest calculation for Paxton to offer this while running for Senate.
JW: As it turns out, there is not enough money in the world to buy Ken Paxton out of being Ken Paxton and voters recognizing that. But Republicans tried this cycle to spend big on transphobia and to blanket the airwaves with these anti-trans advertisements.
Elon Musk’s Texas PAC spent $78 million on anti-transgender ads in Texas, which actually accounted for nearly half of all ad spending in support of Paxton. Republicans’ big play in Texas was transphobia — and that play failed.
While clearly it didn’t sway the election, some of those messages did appear to trickle down to voters. Our colleague, Akela Lacy, talked to voters in Dallas and the surrounding areas, and she did come across some voters who said they wanted to support Talarico or even some voters who did support Talarico but were concerned about his stance on trans rights, an issue that Republicans really fearmongered on this cycle yet again after doing it in 2024.
Akela Lacy: When you said you saw some stuff about James Talarico that made you unsure about voting for him, can you say more about that? What did you see, and what’s your impression of him?
Jermiah Robinson: I think I seen something about the LGBTQ+ community? I mean, I don’t really care about it, but I don’t know. People were saying a lot of bad stuff. I think they said something about him —
Canvasser: Encouraging sex change.
Jermiah Robinson: Yeah, on the children. I don’t really stand for that.
Maia Hibbett: The watchdog group Media Matters also put together a montage that showed just how much Republicans really leaned into this transphobic rhetoric.
Danielle Buck: He wants to trans our kids. He believes that there are six genders.
Andrew Kolvet: They wanna indoctrinate your kids. They wanna trans your kids.
Adam Sosnick: They’re gonna trans your kids. They’re gonna Talarico your kids.
Donald Trump Jr.: Trans kids back in school, trans agendas back in school, in your classrooms, with your children.
JW: Clearly, some of that rhetoric did trickle down to voters based on Akela’s conversations, and some people even believed the misinformation being spread in those ads.
But fearmongering was just clearly not persuasive enough to distract people from their lived reality, and that lived reality is that gas prices are up, rent is unaffordable, and grocery prices are up.
Related
Right-Wing Trans Hate Comes for the WNBA
I think one lesson maybe for Democrats is, there’s no point in attempting to placate people when it comes to bigotry. The right can and will distort your messages, and so you can stand in your values or not, but the thing that’ll motivate voters is if you can convince them that you’re going to make their lives better, not if you can convince them that you’re playing the middle on an issue of civil rights.
MH: We saw a parallel to this in some ways in Michigan as well, where a lot of the Republican argument was based on this perception of Islamophobia and fearmongering. Ultimately, that was not enough to elevate Mike Rogers over Abdul El-Sayed. In Texas, there’s also, of course, the strong anti-immigrant sentiment that Republicans frequently run on, and I think the statewide results showed us that that narrative really fell apart this cycle.
JW: To your point, clearly, attacks on trans people, attacks on immigrants didn’t work in Texas. Democrats had an amazing night. Gina Hinojosa toppled three-term incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott. The state has not had a Democratic governor since 1990.
“Attacks on trans people, attacks on immigrants didn’t work in Texas.”
MH: And speaking of toppling long-term incumbents that have been hard to get out of office, our colleague Noah Hurowitz was in Maine, where Troy Jackson defeated Susan Collins last night after many Democratic attempts to get her out of office.
This issue of disillusionment with money and politics came up quite a bit when he was talking to Maine voters.
Sharon McDonnell: It’s immoral. It is immoral to have people worried about their fuel and have that much money coming into this. It’s just wrong.
“The amount of money is more than I will probably make in my lifetime, spent in this election.”
Tyler Echard: The amount they spent on just mailers, not handed at the door but in the mail, is especially, it seems, on the Republican side of things, has been absolutely insane. The amount of money is more than I will probably make in my lifetime, spent in this election.
Charlie Dingman: It’s been extraordinary in Maine, the amount of spending in this race, particularly in the Senate race. I think there’s a lot of fatigue. I think people are tired of it. I have had some conversations with voters at the doors that lead me to think that the extremely negative and extremely untruthful ads may be backfiring.
JW: It seems like those ads backfired. The last voice you heard was Charlie Dingman, Maine Democratic Party chair.
Collins campaigned on her record of securing federal investments for state infrastructure, such as rural hospitals, and she really prided herself on being a moderate Republican who apparently breaks rank with President Donald Trump. But the reality of the situation is quite different.
Related
Lockheed Martin Showered Susan Collins With Cash as F-35 Program Hit Turbulence
The Congressional Quarterly Roll Call found that her votes aligned with Trump 90 percent of the time in both of the president’s first and second terms, and voters really noticed that. They understood the difference between what she said she was, a political moderate, and her voting record, which aligned with the really far-right Donald Trump. And that’s something that Noah heard from voters as well.
Sharon McDonnell: She has had this persona of moderate cross-party stuff that’s just really eroded. If you read every article about her, it’s like, “Moderate Susan Collins.” Like, wait a minute, she’s voted with Trump. She hasn’t used her power.
Susan Collins “has had this persona of moderate cross-party stuff that’s just really eroded.”
MH: Collins really used that line about her being a moderate and being an independent voice in Washington as a go-to for her campaign.
In past cycles, it has worked. As we alluded to a little bit earlier, the Democrats have mounted challenges against her before. In 2020, they ran a candidate named Sara Gideon, who looked somewhat likely to oust Collins. And I think this cycle, there were a lot of reasons for Democrats to be nervous about this race.
Troy Jackson, the nominee, is a former state senator, and he ran on lowering costs, really centering working-class interests. But he had jumped into the race kind of hastily. If you remember Graham Platner, Jessie, he was the former nominee for Senate in Maine for the Democratic Party, and he was really considered a rising star, but had to drop out because of a series of scandals, and Jackson had to jump in last minute and fill his place.
But ultimately, Jackson pulled it off.
Troy Jackson (acceptance speech): We did it. Working people did it.
JW: Clearly, Jackson had a disadvantage going into this race. There were people who complained and said that he wasn’t as charming as Platner, he wasn’t as polished. But in this election, the ideas and running on affordability seems to have won the day in Maine and really throughout the country.
Collins had a reputation of delivering for the state, but clearly that wasn’t enough to overcome this blue wave across the country and some frustrations with Collins as well.
But Maia, taking a step back to look at the full scope of Democratic wins, what do you make of their gains on Tuesday? Are there other races that stood out to you? What stood out to you overall?
MH: Well, there’s the spin about the spin, which is that everybody is going to be framing this election and these results in their own interests. When Democrats win so far across the board, you can make an argument that any faction of the Democratic Party has the mandate, because Democrats of all stripes won Tuesday night.
Related
The Progressive Agenda: End Iran War, Rein in AI, Get Dems to Actually Do Something
But to my view, it’s hard to see how this is a world where there isn’t a clear demand for some kind of transformational change. So I’m wondering what Democrats do with their mandate now, especially as we think ahead to 2028.
If you recall 2020 and the last time the U.S. elected a Democratic president, you might remember that the Biden campaign was the sort of centrist, moderate return to normalcy choice, but they got there after a lot of left momentum in the primary and a really serious showing of support for Bernie Sanders, who remains one of the most popular politicians in the country.
Once Biden got into office, he arguably tried to give some of that kind of left, dare we say, populist economic message some service. There was the Build Back Better plan that had a lot of social safety net spending and Covid relief. There were climate infrastructure projects. There was the elevation of Lina Khan [to Federal Trade Commission chair].
For a little while, Biden was getting called the most progressive president since FDR, and then he threw it all away supporting the genocide in Gaza and really lost the support of the left, and then lost the support of the country when he was kind of visibly melting on the debate stage and refusing to drop out of the race.
So I’m curious what Democrats have learned from the Biden years and how that will convert into the next congressional term and the next presidential election.
JW: It really feels like I’ve lived a million lives in between now and that debate that really tanked Joe Biden’s entire political career at the end there.
I will say to your point, we’re already seeing Hakeem Jeffries, who’s likely to be the House Speaker, calling for unity and saying that people don’t want to fight. But you don’t really get a blue wave like this or a political wave like this when people don’t want to fight.
Clearly, there’s anger at Republicans. There’s anger at the cost of living. There’s anger at the war. If Democrats don’t deliver, they’re likely to see a red wave come the next cycle.
Related
The Supreme Court Ends Multiracial Democracy as We Know It
But I did want to take just a little bit of a step back and talk about Black voters and what’s happened in the aftermath of the Supreme Court voting rights decision. Black voters in this election really delivered historic victories in southern states for Democrats, but Black representation in Congress thus far appears to have been slightly reduced in this election. Now, for those who remember our discussion earlier this year about the Supreme Court decision to gut the Voting Rights Act, there were a lot of deep concerns that the decision would crater Black political representation, and so far that hasn’t come to bear, but it’s worth paying attention to in cycles that are less blue, where we’ve seen really massive redistricting.
I will shout out, there was one historic victory for Black Americans: Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor, won her race for governor, becoming the first Black female governor in the country.
MH: We’ve talked a lot about these historic wins, but we would be remiss to not mention a close call in Florida, where Angie Nixon narrowly lost.
Nixon is a Black woman who’s a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and had a really shocking primary upset when she defeated the establishment favorite to get the Democratic nomination. The Democrats didn’t invest very much in her Senate race in Florida. The conventional wisdom says Florida’s not flippable, but conventional wisdom also says that South Carolina’s not flippable — and they did that.
“The conventional wisdom says Florida’s not flippable, but conventional wisdom also says that South Carolina’s not flippable — and they did that.”
Nixon ended up coming within about 2 [percentage] points to Ashley Moody, the Republican incumbent, who just won a full term after being appointed to hold the seat that used to belong to [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio. A lot of people on the left side of the Democratic Party are wondering what would have happened if Democrats had invested in a DSA candidate running statewide in Florida, which is kind of a crazy statement to make if you think of just two years ago.
JW: I mean, I listened to her [concession] speech, she is an incredible speaker, but obviously, that’s not enough to win elections. You need money, clearly, and investment from the party.
We’re going to leave it there, but there is so much more election coverage you can follow at theintercept.com.
That does it for this episode.
We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at [email protected], or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST, that’s 530-763-2278.
This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Thank you to all of our reporters who worked late on election night: Matt Sledge, Akela Lacy, Noah Hurowitz, Jonah Valdez, and Austin Campbell, and the rest of our team.
Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.
Slip Stream provided our theme music.
This show and our reporting at The Intercept do not exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join.
And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review; it helps other listeners find our reporting.
Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.
MH: And I’m Maia Hibbett.
The post How Democrats Changed Everything appeared first on The Intercept.